Ideas for Birthday party games (age 6 and 9)

[MontyBowJangles]

I'm having a small party for each of my boys next month and thought it would be good to do some games. They're turning 6 and 9 and will have 4 or 5 school friends over for pizza and cake. They're too old for pass the parcel and musical bumps etc so wondered if anyone had any new ideas for me please?

We gave up on games for boys from age 6 as they just werent interested. Bowling or laser game were great hits.

If you have to do it at home then an escape game would work for the 9 year olds

At my youngests 5th party we had a lot of success with a police academy. DH was the chief and put them through their paces to earn a certificate. Included obstacle courses, musical statues, shooting soft toys off boxes with nerf guns...

However the end part was just lots of little boys running around with various guns.

Treasure hunt worked for little ones.

For the older ones have you any suitable board games?

Wacko. Sweets of different kinds on a plate, one person leaves the room, others choose sweet to be wacko sweet, person comes back, chooses sweet eats it, until get to the wacko sweet at which point everyone shouts wacko, sweet is not eaten.
Chocolate game - sit in circle with wrapped bar of chocolate in middle, roll die, if get a six sit in middle put on hat, scarf, gloves, take knife and fork, attempt to cut and eat choc bar, while everyone else still Rolling die - if another six is rolled that person goes in middle
Runaround - ask questions, answers in different corners of the room, run to correct answer, out if incorrect. Or do it with numbers, roll dice, out if not run to correct number.
Write something eg guinea pigs dancing,, next person draws that thing underneath and folds over the written bit, next person writes what they think it is, etc. No winner, just amusement.

Last year for DCs party i got loads of ballooons and filled them with party bag fillers, sweets etc, gave each kid a balloon colour to find and pop with a cocktail stick, maybe too old for yours but the kids ages ranged from 2 to 7 and they all enjoyed it,

Would you rather? Come up with a series of would you rather questions like would you rather eat a slug or touch dog poo, would you rather ride a unicorn or fly a dragon ,etc. To make it more interesting use a rope to separate the two choices so children run from one side to the other representing their choice.

Chair game: put a bag of sweets under each chair (you need about 3-4 more chairs than children). Everyone sits randomly on a chair and they take it in turns to blindly pick an instruction e.g. if your eyes are blue move two chairs to the right, if your favourite colour is green move one chair to the left, if you have a brother move three chairs to the left. When all the instructions are finished, you get to eat the sweets under the chair you are sitting on. If two or more people are on the same chair they have to share.

Treasure hunt: this can be as complex as you like. You can have riddles, or clues where you need to change the numbers into letters following a code, or maths problems to solve, or items to find hidden around a room (socks are good for this). I’ve done this with three teams, over three rooms and three sets of colour coded clues, so one team looked for pink clues and pink items, another for green and another for yellow.

Wow, thanks everyone! Some great suggestions here, which I'll go through with DH tomorrow.

Forgot to say 9yo is taking a couple of mates to Laserquest first then back here for pizza, where they'll be joined by three more friends (so will be three girls and three boys total here).

In which case for the 9 year old Id just let them play together. Unless your DC really wants organised games.

For my 8 year old we had everyone here for cake, sweets and opening presents. Then they free played for an hour. Then we herded them out to laser game.